The top movers are: Citizen Marketer 2.1, CK’s Blog, and Jeff Bulla’s Blog; each moving 50+ positions!

• Citizen Marketer 2.1 experienced a spike of traffic in mid November for his Brand Haiku blog post.  A band of bloggers and companies (including Apple) participated in describing a brand experience in a form of a haiku.

*New means they were not in the Sept post, or recently added to our database.

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The team here at eCairn always appreciates any feedback!

As an introduction,  here are the key expressions (*) mentioned in the Social Marketing Community when talking about “quantity and quality” (**):

It’s interesting to see that:

• time & work are high up in the list.
• many expressions are around seo, link building but also content.
• twitter and  facebook are frequently mentioned, and so are followers … but not friends.
• a significant number of expressions around business, strategy and influence.

The consensus is really that it depends on your business objective.

In listening for example, we tend to learn more by focusing on a few people, influencers in your community, and going deep; sometimes by listening to millions of people.

Something subtle though … (that is linked to the Dunbar number).

When you see two individuals, and increase the group  to four or ten over a period of time, you will still be able to identify the two individuals.  There is a threshold however, where you no longer see individuals but a crowd of anonymous voices and a river of noise.

You may spot a few conversations that are really loud and negative. But you wont see how close these detractors are one to the other, whether they are scattered among the community, whether they are surrounded by many others.

You will fail to notice that these conversations come from people who have been strangely silent for a while, or were interestingly talking together prior to starting shouting.

You will not see that these detractors belong to a specific market segment, or worse that they are users of your products & services

I find it amazing that marketers engage in large listening efforts without differentiating users and non users, or buyers and non buyers.

Listening is only valuable when it provides insights at the individual/target group level else this is just noise.

Otherwise, it’s as useful as to predict the popularity of the Giants based on the number of people wearing orange shirts on the planet.

(*) I removed quality, quantity and social media to increase legibility

(**) using Conversation(tm).

SMM Rolodex

From a 2000 feet prospective,  social media solutions are all the same. They more or less enable brands to listen and engage with communities.

In practice, it’s way more subtle and one analogy I’d like to propose is that you’ve providers that build Yellow Pages and others that build Rolodex (we fall into this category).

Both are useful and there are differentiated benefits from both type of solutions. What is critical however is for brands and agencies to clearly articulate their business needs and select the appropriate tool-set for the task at hand. It’s also very important to think beyond the first use of the solution selected.

Social Media Monitoring Solutions tend to be easier to setup and to operate. You just plug in your brand keywords and bingo.  (This, provided of course,  one can find the appropriate set of queries to search the Social Yellow pages).

Rolodex approach requires more work, more thinking around how a brand wants to organize its Social Rolodex and how it wants to structure its listening and engagement in different communities.  This is even more important if the Rolodex is a shared Rolodex within a mid-size/large company.

Again the analogy works very well. It takes minutes to open the Yellow Pages whereas one may spend several hours a week organizing and maintaining its Rolodex.

What’s key with Rolodex is that it enable people to build a differentiated asset that will deliver value over multiple enterprises functions and systems.

Let’s take a not-so-fictive example of an IT company that’s delivering services & product for Cloud Computing.

Using a Yellow Pages approach, it can get some pretty solid indicator relative to share of voice and (with rating) sentiment. However, without any qualification of the sources of the information (expert, influencer, audience, position in the community, analysis of what this person says over time, level of connection with the company or with competitors), it ‘ll be very difficult to transform this into actionable knowledge.

Using a Rolodex approach – and spending the time to built it-, this company will be able to:

• Build a common repository of people that constitute the community of  “Cloud Computing”  & listen to them wherever they  write, tweet and comment (blog, twitter…),
• Perform targeted sentiment analysis on these key stakeholders.
• Spot whether any of these stakeholder are over time more positive or negative about them. Build action plans to change perspective.
• Influence specific clusters through outreach, buzz and content development.
• Thru regular participation in the conversations,  build up trust.
  
• Prevent crisis, making these influencers  more careful propagating rumors or false information about the brand i.e people that they know and trust.
• Perform deep qualitative analytics. Since the “river of news” is built from similar sources and is noise free, it can be mined with greater results.
• Spot candidates for virtual focus group, crowd sourcing of new ideas (btw, I’m amazed that people embark in crowdsourcing without targeting. If a brand makes a strategic decision to focus its solution for small business, wouldn’t that make sense that it restrict s the crowdsourcing of new ideas from the specific small business community ?).
• Develop communication strategies that leverage community and influencers
• Socialize their corporate web site with the voices of these trustable sources and their audience.

and so on…

From a strategy standpoint, these approaches also differ widely:

On the Yellow pages one: the goal is to spend as less time as possible in social media, while grabbing as much as what can be learned with a Google Search like interaction. But there is no social engagement. People even dream of automating sentiment and are totally adverse to the idea of reading conversations.

One can even say that here, brand uses technology to mitigate the risk of not participating in the conversations.

On the Rolodex one: the goal is to capitalize every minute spent in social media and putting this capitalized knowledge at work for maximum benefits.

Here, listening and engagement is view as an asset and an opportunity, not as a liability.

Two paradigms, Two solutions … and so many opportunities.

” you would not come to a party and start shouting I’m the best or Buy my product ! that’s no difference in social media “

Perfectly true.  Still the same people advocate brand monitoring as THE utlimate social media program people should start with.

Humm… would you come to any party and ask “what do you think about me, is this positive ?, negative”

The truth is unless you’re Obama or Michael Phelps,  or unless you target the community of your very closed friends, nobody would have any opinion. 

Actually, for the people who don’t have an established brand, monitoring is really what they should do  AFTER they have spend a great deal in listening, learning, building connections and trust. I would argue that even major brand should behave the same.

So how should companies leverage social media ?

1. listen
2. reflect & build a real engagement strategy ( Specific- Measurable -Actionable -Relevant and Time-based): one that your entire team can execute upon including: who to target, where to engage, resources/knowledge that we bring on the table, how to move the discussion one on one , what to measure, when to stop…
3. target: time is short and attention is scarce and companies should really focus on the communities they want to reach
4. listen (actively), share and learn. the good thing is that employees are already reading blogs, spending time in Facebook and LinkedIn and participating in conversations, so what this really means is to help them do it better, learn from their peers, align (softly) and leverage
5. build trust and influence, as real people and as a company
6. share the learnings with the organisation at large, from what customers, prospects and non customers desire, fear, request. How they talk, what works and what doesn’t, how diverse they are…
7. monitor results and this may be way different from counting the number of time your product or brand name is mentioned in the blogosphere. There may be countries where ecairn , jumbo or ronaldo is a cute name for a dog !

So does that mean monitoring should come last ?